Melinda Blau

On her and Karen Fingerman's book Consequential Strangers: Turning Everyday Connections Into Life-Changing Moments

Cover Interview of August 22, 2010

In a nutshell

We are living at a time when digital technologies allow us to more easily extend the boundaries of our social circles than we could in the past. This book recognizes that reality—and the fact that life is too complex to depend solely on the people closest to us.

Consequential Strangers examines the vast, unsung array of everyday people, on and off the Internet, who skirt the edges of our social circles and who have a surprisingly profound impact on our success, happiness, and health.

In collaboration with psychologist Karen L. Fingerman, who coined the term “consequential strangers,” I drew from a wealth of social science research and more than two hundred interviews to underscore the importance of this wider social terrain.

Unlike people closest to us, who know what we know, consequential strangers expand our horizons. They can lead us to new ideas and allow us to stretch ourselves. They offer information and resources we simply can’t get from loved ones. While not all of these lesser relations are good to us or for us, the vast majority are–among other reasons because we can usually walk away when they’re not.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011